Alexander Hamilton was, by the time he was a teenager, already running the daily operations of an international trading company on the Caribbean island of St. Croix — managing shipments, currency exchange, and credit for a firm whose owner regularly left him in sole charge for weeks at a time. He was, by any honest accounting of his circumstances, an orphan with no money, no formal education, and no path to American citizenship at all when this all started, because the United States did not yet exist.

This episode follows Hamilton from Nevis and St. Croix — illegitimate birth, an abandoning father, a mother dead of fever before he turned fourteen — through the patrons who recognized his ability and funded his passage to the colonies, his rise as George Washington's most trusted aide during the Revolutionary War, and his work as the first Secretary of the Treasury building, essentially from nothing, the financial architecture that allowed the United States to function as an actual country rather than thirteen states with separate, competing debts.

Like John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington himself, Hamilton never signed the Declaration of Independence — he was nineteen years old in 1776, newly arrived in the colonies, not yet a delegate to anything. His signature appears instead on the Constitution, as New York's sole original signer, and on more than fifty of the Federalist Papers that helped convince a skeptical public to ratify it.

We also examine, in full, the duel that ended his life on July 11, 1804 — fought on the same New Jersey dueling ground where his own eldest son had died three years earlier, against a sitting Vice President of the United States, over a political feud that had been building for the better part of two decades.

This is Day 13 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

A companion article is available on Medium — linked in the show notes.

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